transferring a linuxice installation

10-01-2010, 10:03 PM

i got a touchscreen computer (one of these are used at grocery stores for checkouts) and it has a PIII 750mhz processor in it. i have a usb cd drive and a thumb drive, neither which are detected at boot so I can't boot any installation of any kind at the moment. I was wondering if by installing a 32 bit installation on another computer, could the hard drive then be transferred? there is no on board cd drive either and network booting isnt supported by the bios. in the bios the boot order does have a cd drive although I see no where inside this thing as to where it could be connected. it has a mobile 2.5 ide hard drive also and only 1 ide port. I want to try and get this thing to be a media control center for my music in my garage, i think it would be perfect for it.

Short answer to you question is yes -- you can do what your are talking about using any distro. Just make sure the boot loader is on the 1st sector of the hard drive you plan on moving around (/dev/sda not /dev/sda1)

Comment

so i tried to get my installation to transfer and it did partly. I installed it on another machine and transferred the hard drive. It booted normal, but just after the auto login when it loads xwindows, the screen goes black (along with the backlight). The error logs told me that there was something up with the video driver or the screen not being configured. So I messed with it a little, including using the vesa driver, but nothing helped.

So I got an idea and used a 3.5 to 2.5 ide adapter to connect a cd drive and try to boot the live cd. Well it worked except for the same display issue, but I can't read any logs for obvious reasons. I tried to boot a regular ubuntu disc and it would boot up and right before the box pops up to ask you to install or try it out it hangs. The mouse displays but the dialog box doesn't appear. It would have been that I didn't wait long enough but all I wanted to try out was to see if the display would work with linux and it seems that it does. The computer is a pIII wit 128 meg of ram, could the ram be an issue? I was thinking that maybe there wasn't enough ram for it to use and possibly hanging because of it. I might try the lucid x32 live cd again and try to at least get an installation going. Any ideas on why the display is shutting off?